


Volatile

by SilverMirror12



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Drugs, F/M, Hallucinations, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-17
Updated: 2010-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-10 03:59:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/95238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMirror12/pseuds/SilverMirror12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Batman does not get Scarebeast to Arkham in time, and Jonathan tracks Linda down, intent on revenge. When their versions of the fear toxin, just different enough to be a threat to the other, collide in the fight, the result is explosive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Volatile

Jonathan Crane was a very thorough man, and none of this applied more truthfully than when it came to his fear toxin. He knew the formula by heart, could write the components blinded and mix them with unlabeled vials just from the sound the brew made when the chemicals touched. He knew how every incarnation affected every type of person, and how to exacerbate or relieve the symptoms with relative speed. Whatever they thought of _him_, people at least agreed that the fear toxin, fright dust, or whatever name they whispered at night, was _his_ toy, and the thought of ever trying to recreate it was shot down as an abysmal failure just waiting to happen.

Until one very ambitious geneticist slipped through the cracks in Jonathan's armor that he didn't even know were there, and learned the secret. More than that, she modified it to something of her _own_ design.

Which brought up a question that even the Scarecrow did not know the answer to. What would happen when two incarnations of the toxin, honed to a deadly potency and _just_ different enough to be at threat to the other, collided? Would they cancel each other out? Double the effects? Kill both users and linger, invisible poison in the air, for months to come? Jonathan found out the answer on the night he tried to kill his former assistant.

Linda (he refused to call her Fright; it was just another thing she'd stolen from him) had not expected him to elude Batman so quickly, before Arkham could safely lock him up again. She'd thought that they'd hold him while she made good use of her new abilities and slipped into a decadent obscurity she'd never in her life known before. She'd even hoped, vainly, that Jonathan would never know who it was that twisted his DNA to nightmarish proportions. It was silly, but Linda was secretly hoping that Jonathan would still remember her only as his soft-spoken, supportive assistant, and not a traitor to be hated. It was just a job, after all, and she _needed_ the rewards it gave her. Linda had done her job too well, however, and neither the GCPD nor Batman could contain the newly dubbed "Scarebeast", nor catch him as he slipped away into the night, still as much a part of shadows as Scarecrow himself.

Scarebeast found her lounging on the balcony of some abandoned apartment building, condemned as all buildings of this sort were wont to be. He attacked her from above, a monster of her own design come home to roost. It was only her amplified agility that saved Linda as she flipped off of the railing, back inside as Scarebeast crashed down where her body had once been. The railing snapped and the balcony groaned, but Scarebeast darted inside before it could fall. He grabbed Linda with primal fury, and something equally as cutting hidden deeper underneath.

She said something, but Scarebeast was a creature beyond words, and he pinned her to the wall. Before the claws at her throat tightened, Linda inhaled, ignoring the cuts such a movement produced and _blew_, just as Scarebeast expelled his own noxious breath. The sister poisons collided, thick and expanding, and they were both immediately coughing. Scarebeast stumbled back, dizzy and shrinking. He collapsed on the floor, human and half -naked. Jonathan's head spun and the thick gas in the room caused his vision to blur. Linda was in a similar position in front of him, her own eyes glazed as she tried to both stand and curl in on herself at once. They were inoculated from their own toxins, but not each other's, and the mixing vapors in the air had created something entirely different.

While it is obviously her first time experiencing a concentrated dose of chemical terror, Jonathan, far more used to these little trips than her, found himself grinning (or snarling, he wasn't sure which). He wasted no time pouncing on her disoriented, weakened state, pinning her to the ground and making himself the sole focus of her nightmare, as it should be. Linda flinched, briefly, at the sight of him distorted and wicked above her, but her wide eyes (turned gray from experimentation, but glowing scarlet now in the dream-world they'd sunk into) only glared at him. It was a look he'd only seen a few times, and it had always been directed at someone other than him. Jonathan found it thrilling to see, now, knowing that Linda could overpower him if she wanted, but was trapped by horrors of her own making.

The thrill made him angry, and the Scarecrow tightened his grip on her until the bones ground together into fairy dust. He leaned down, opening his mouth to mock her, to curse her, to ask her _why_...

His lips crushed against hers instead, suddenly a gaping maw with a snake for a tongue.

Linda didn't waste any time as she bit down, her teeth like a serrated blade. Fright wasn't a name chosen lightly, and she retaliated by pulling him closer to her, surely knowing that the action caused a vivid flash of claustrophobia to race through him. His mind couldn't help but wildly identify the fears the toxins were creating; it seemed to have created a nondiscriminatory mixture, exaggerating all fears instead of a specific few. Jonathan trusted against her once, twice, unforgivably hard, and the movements seemed to make the very floor shake _(earthquakophobia)_. Linda's skin felt slimy under his spidery hands, like worms _(scoleciphiobia)_, and Jonathan's own skin turned into burlap, rubbing her raw and making her bleed _(hemophobia)_.

Jonathan descended upon her neck to bite, and she screamed at something she could see and feel, but was not truly there. The sound of clothes ripped off bodies sounded like the tearing of flesh, and Linda's fingers that danced and cut all down his back felt like angry spiders _(arachnophobia)_. There were monsters in the mist, Jonathan knew (he could feel them on his chest, their fat lips sucking and licking, trying to eat his heart), they were voyeurs to a nightmare dance with the one woman he had actually dared to think...

There were white snakes between his fingers, a long scream bubbling in their throats, and it's a rough and messy kill as they move together, until their minds and bodies snap in two. Jonathan wished he knew what Linda saw, but he couldn't wish too hard because then he would be distracted by how she shook in his arms. Linda was snarling and angry and defiant and terrified, and she was _so_ beautiful to him then.

But Linda was not someone he could predict or control, and when Jonathan pushed inside of her (the walls fell down as he did, revealing how high they were; acrophobia), she only laughed, a sound that had stretched and twisted itself like elastic to sound completely unlike a shriek of terrified ecstasy. Jonathan froze, deep inside to the hilt and irrationally feeling like the inside of her was made of straw, because he heard something _familiar_ in that laugh.

It had to be her, all her fault, because Jonathan _never_ saw this on his own toxin, made sure that it would _never_ effect him that deeply---

\---Great-Granny Keeny wrapped too strong legs around his waist, squeezing with a moan that sounded wickedly amused as she stared up at him from a fan of too long hair. Granny (nonotrealit'slindanotgranny_linda_) arched against him, the breast containing the heart he both loved and hated pressing against his chest, a chest suddenly eating itself whole from the inside out---

Jonathan continued to thrust against her, even as he screamed.


End file.
